2-step process: a proven marketing strategy to get people interested and turning up to your activities

Do you want to make your marketing 10x as effective? Depending on what you’re doing at the moment, this might be possible.

There are a few thing absolutely crucial in order to be able to really up the effectiveness of your marketing.

One is the 2-step process, which we are going to cover in more detail here. It’s really important to have this 2-step process in place.

Let’s talk about The 2-step process!

The “normal” way of doing marketing in sport and activity historically is to use what we call a one-step process. We basically only market the activity. Someone will make an ad or a leaflet saying “This is where the activity session is” by using posters and leaflets, and expect that people will turn up.

The main problem here is the lack of confidence that people have.

So people see the details of your activity, they think it sounds good, and then all of their uncertainties, nervousness and doubts start to come into play and they don’t decide to take part – and then we’ve lost them!

This means that we often only attract those people who are more confident – those who are already active.

Instead of this one-step process, we have developed our 2-step process.

Step 1 – Drive enquiries through marketing

Step 2 – Respond to enquiries

At first glance, this doesn’t seem as it makes a big difference but it’s really important and it had an enormous effect on the way we do marketing.

1. Drive enquiries through marketing

To make this work we still need:

Right marketing tactics

Target the right people

Right messages

Right imagery

But, all we are doing here is trying to get people to make an enquiry in some way, to let us know they are interested.

This is a much smaller step than turning up to the activity, so we get a much larger number of people taking this step.

We can then follow up with them and get them to come along and take part. What this leads to is a large number of enquiries for the same (or smaller) budget.

You’ll get a lot of people signing up telling you that they are interested.

For example, we were running a walking campaign recently in Redbridge and we had 320 people sign up telling us they were interested.

2. The next step is then to respond to the enquiries

When we respond, we link people up with the right activity for them and we send them the details of it.

We use email and text messages for that.

SMS is very important and works really well. We’ve covered why SMS works so well here.

Then, if people have questions they come back to us with their questions or if they decide to turn up they tell us if they are coming along.

Finally, we have a chance to follow up with them again and again weekly sending them details of any future events or reminding them to take part in the activity.

What that does – it leads to those inactive people who were nervous about getting started having enough contact from us to actually come along and take part.

This allows you to address people’s uncertainty and give them reassurance.

They have a chance to engage with a real person and find out the answers to any of their questions and then they come along and take part.

This 2-step process is really effective in getting more people into activities, specifically those inactive people or hard to reach groups.

Next thing to talk about is using the right marketingtactics, we’ll soon cover this in our future blog posts.

Some of our results:

In Bucks, more than 2000 people became more active.

In Hounslow, more than 1100 people were involved in their Active 10 Campaign.

Walking for Health engaged more than 4000 people with a Facebook ad campaign.

In Wandle Valley, we’ve reached almost 500 people.

We’ve reached almost 200 people with disabilities in Yorkshire.

We currently run campaigns that have engaged hundreds of people across Hounslow and Redbridge.

You can find each of these as a case study on our Blog page.

Want to sign up for our free online workshop – How to Engage Inactive People? Learn how Facebook Ads can allow you to engage inactive people from your target audience.